Happy 50th birthday, BASIC [View all]

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It's an acronym. It stands for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

BASIC

The Golden Age of Basic

Tech Talk Computing Software
By Stephen Cass
Posted 1 May 2014 | 12:59 GMT

IEEE Spectrum isn’t the only thing celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. On this day in 1964, the first software written in Basic was successfully run on a GE-225 mainframe at Dartmouth College. As critical a moment as that was to the history of computing, I want to skip ahead twenty years and talk about what Basic meant to a generation of neophyte coders in the 1980s, of which I was one.

Today, programmers can begin their journeys into the world of code in quite a few ways. 8 to 12-year olds can use MIT’s Scratch, manipulating colorful blocks on screen to build programs. Older kids can tinker with writing HTML and Javascript, have a go at writing Python scripts on a Raspberry Pi or just go straight to downloading free compilers and development environments for languages like C or C++. Visual and musical artists can try their hand at Processing. There’s even the option of learning how to build insanely elaborate devices in the virtual world of Minecraft. Online tutorials and courses, written and video-based, abound.

But in the 1980s, most kids didn’t have access to the Internet, integrated development environments, rich graphics, or even a choice of languages. What we had were 8-bit home computers, a blinking cursor, and Basic.

And it was wonderful. God, it really was.